kentriolinda
Member
Today I was replacing all exhisting kitchen & bath recp. with GFCI recp at an appartment complex 80% were changed out without incident. Two of the appt. had the same problem they had looped the wires into the boxs ( all wiring is hard piped) and without cutting wire stripped back insulation and just looped it around recp. screws and continued on. The problem was that when I changed out the recp. in these two apt.s ( I chose to do them hot because they were so far away from the breaker panel ) I cut the looped common and the light bulbs in the kitchen and hall instantly burned out. So upon further investagation I found that from hot to one common leg I had 144 volts and from hot to other half of common I had 121 volts and volts between the two commons was 121. My question is how could one common being cut in half give me 121 v between the two halves. A second why cutting that wire caused such a spike in voltage.